Ultranormal

Tag: twitter

  • Social Media is a Cancer

    Social Media is a Cancer

    Back in January, I came up with my new social media rules and they worked for a while, but the more I actually looked at how I felt before and after a session on Facebook or Twitter, I decided they weren’t working – and worse, that at least those two platforms aren’t worth it.

    Facebook is a cancer that’s taken our relationships and turned them against us in order to sell advertising. I’ve always called Facebook “what community would look like if designed by a sociopath” and it just gets truer. Facebook, as a company, has no ethics, no moral compass, and lies constantly about the effects it has on our society, and more importantly, our relationships. It’s powered by outrage and amping up emotions.

    I started taking stock of my emotional state before I opened Facebook and then after I close it, and I never feel better after having scrolled through the outrage-of-the-day posts, dumb memes and gripes about this and that. Never. Not once.

    Twitter’s even worse. I used to say that Twitter was the internet’s dinner party where you’re always two seats away from the best conversation. Now, it’s the internet’s brick fight. It’s constant outrage, clapbacks, sarcasm, and vain attempts at temporary viral glory. It’s gone from fun to toxic.

    So, what to do about it? Eject. I now treat Facebook and Twitter like email addresses I don’t care about. I check it once or twice a day just to see if I have any new notifications and that’s it. I might post when I write something new here, or if there’s an event I’m organizing (like codebar), but that’s it. No more endless scrolling. No more posting in hopes of more likes. I still post photos to Instagram, because photos are great and it’s been somehow immune to the worst impulses of its parent company.

    It’s taken a while to break the habit. Deleting the Facebook and Twitter apps from my phone has helped. But, I also installed several new games on my phone to try to keep myself from going back to old habits (I’ll just start toxic new ones, yay!). Instead of compulsively opening Facebook when I pick up my phone, I’ll see what’s going on with the Angry Birds or if I can level up a hero in Fieldrunners Attack.

    I’m sad about the state of social media. I had such hopes for them bringing people together and building empathy. Unfortunately, it’s brought together nazis, pedophiles and assholes – and the rest of us now have pointless arguments to make algorithms happy. It’s all so… stupid.

    I don’t know where those platforms will end up, but at this point, I don’t care and they can go there without me being trapped there.

  • My New Social Media Rules

    Social Media, Social Media, Social Media! It’s awful! It’s ruining everything! Why are we all still using it then! I’ll leave it to experts to explain that part, but in an effort to extract myself from the worst of Facebook and Twitter, here are my new rules for myself. I’ve been following some form of them for over a year, and they’ve definitely made me feel better, almost as good as when I stopped watching cable news.

    My Facebook Rules:

    1. Remorselessly snooze and unfollow toxic people, even if they’re close friends or family. I’m trying a two snooze then unfollowing if I still can’t deal with their posts showing up in my feed.
    2. Don’t dive into comments on a post where you don’t know everyone. There are too many trolls, and it’s not worth it.
    3. Don’t join new groups unless you have to.
    4. Never ever ever click ads. They’re almost always a scam anyway.
    5. No quizzes ever, not even the funny ones.
    6. Don’t share content from pages you don’t run.
    7. Set a timer. That’s your “mindlessly wandering Facebook” time. When the timer goes off, close the app.
    8. Use Facebook in a browser you don’t use for anything else (or use the Firefox Facebook Container extension).
    9. Before you post, think “should this be a blog post?” and post it here instead of on Facebook. It’ll last longer, and you’ll be able to find it again.

    My Twitter Rules:

    • Don’t leave twitter open all the time. Check it like you would email.
    • Don’t speak in the internet’s, and especially twitter’s, default “sarcastic jackass” tone. Be conversational. Be helpful. Be fun. Because there’s too little of all of that.
    • Don’t feed the trolls (this is evergreen, but twitter is now majority troll and it’s just not worth it).

    I don’t always follow them. I’m human. I screw up, and I can’t think of a case where I didn’t regret it almost immediately. I hope they’re helpful to you.

  • What’s the Point of Twitter?

    I’m twitter user #3,404. I’ve been a daily twitter user since before it had vowels, so I’ve seen it grow from a fun little experiment to a platform with a lot of promise to the behemoth it is today. How I’ve used the service has changed over time, but it seems like more and more, I use it to complain. And from the folks that I follow, they’re doing the same.

    Yeah, we use twitter to celebrate victories, share breaking news, and keep in touch – but it feels like the vast majority of tweets from the people I follow are sarcastic land mines – and mine are too. It’s too easy to pop open my twitter client and unleash my righteous indignation at the latest outrage perpetrated by the internet. Sarcasm is easier than productivity, encouragement, enlightenment or even humor. It’s to the point that a great percentage of my vocabulary exists only to express sarcasm.

    But, it’s not helpful. It’s not even all that much fun. It’s mostly annoying and makes people more likely to be sarcastic and annoying themselves.

    So, I’m going to try to stop. My challenge for myself this week is not to post any sarcastic tweets. None. Zero.

    Wish me luck. It’s going to be so hard.